"Thank God
for this class," wrote Maria Gonzalez. "Without the class being offered
online I would not be able to take it. I've long been interested in
taking a journalism class, but because of my kids and work schedule
I cannot take classes offered during the day. Even evening classes
are difficult to attend."

This and other
comments are among the joys of teaching my beginning newswriting class
as a distance education class online. Another benefit is that I've managed
to more than double the enrollments in my newswriting classes. I've
opened my courses to a whole new audience while maintaining standards
I felt were so important.

I resisted it for
a long time. Surely, teaching a distance education class could not be
as fulfilling and practical as in person, I thought. I was afraid of
distance education.

Others have worked
with distance education for newswriting. Perhaps the most well known
is Peter Berkow's Newswriting telecourse. His program is great at teaching
ABOUT newswriting and I use his tapes in my traditional course to supplement
my lectures, but a telecourse does not fit my style of actually teaching
writing.

But one day distance
education for newswriting suddenly made sense to me. And teaching it
in a new way has invigorated my teaching in my traditional class.

Getting over the
fear of distance education was the first step. Rather than looking at
it as a threat, I looked at it as an opportunity. My first thought along
these lines was to be the first on the block --or in my case the first
in the state of California-- to offer an online newswriting class and
maybe pick up a student from this school and another from that school
until I had a full class. Instead, I found out that getting students
from other schools from around the state was not realistic. What I got
mostly were students from my own school who were not taking my traditional
courses for a number of reasons, including the timing of when I scheduled
my classes. I think I also get students who are more interested in taking
a class via online than taking a journalism class. But that is okay,
too.

My college has
adopted a philosophy that distance education classes must essentially
be the same as traditional classes in content and other respects. The
main difference is merely the mode of delivery. This is important. While
I am sure that administrators would love to see 100-plus students in
all distance education courses --there is, after all, no seat limitation
that a traditional classroom offers-- this is not practical for a writing
course. Our school sets enrollment limits of distance education courses
the same as the traditional classroom. In my case that meant a maximum
of 22 students.

The college's philosophy
also applies to class load. A distance education course here is loaded
the same as a traditional course. At some schools instructors get less
than a full load for distance education courses, particularly courses
delivered via pre-packaged television. If anything, a distance education
course requires more time from an instructor.

The second step
was to figure out how to teach the class without face-to-face interaction
and maintain the high standard I set for my classes. The manner in which
I teach my newswriting course helped here. I long ago adopted a newswriting
workbook ("Practice Exercises in Newswriting" by George Hough,
Houghton-Mifflin) in my course. I like the fictional city setting he
has created to lay a background for real life type stories. Much of
my class has evolved into students writing and my marking papers. This
can be done by e-mail. In fact, those who teach online classes find
that they end up having greater interaction with students when commenting
on their writing. For instance, where I might simply use a copyediting
mark on a piece of paper, in e-mail I have to include a fuller explanation.

And because I have
students I never meet, I spend more time asking them questions about
themselves in our exchange of e-mail messages. It is a challenge to
find ways to keep students engaged in the class when you have only the
written word to do so. I recently had a student answer a question I
had posed by using current slang as part of her answer. Instead of merely
indicating that her assignment was "OKAY" as I do with most assignments,
I decided to let her know her assignment was "PHAT," which as much as
I can tell is one of today's slang words for something that is pretty
good. By coincidence shortly thereafter we met face-to-face for the
first time. She was surprised to find out that I was a middle-aged white
guy. "How'd you get so hip?" she asked. Already she is looking for additional
journalism courses I teach that she can take.

My teaching pattern
for my traditional class is to open each class with a short lecture
introducing a new concept about newswriting and then give students workbook
assignments to put the concepts into practice. I found it took an incredibly
great deal of time to convert my lectures to online. After 25 years
of teaching I can write a lecture outline in 15 minutes. Give me an
hour and I can produce PowerPoint slides to go with the lecture. But
to write out the same lecture, word for word, and then edit it to a
reasonable online reading attention span takes hours. I recommend planning
for an online class at least a semester in advance. Teach your traditional
course during the day and that evening imagine how you would teach the
same lesson online. Build your course before you offer it.

To insure that
students are "attending" lectures each one has a few questions at the
bottom that students must answer by e-mail. I do the same with textbook
reading assignments. The questions are not difficult, but are designed
to make sure that the student completes the assignment. Whether the
student learns from the lecture or reading will show up in the written
assignments.

Some of the lectures
are specifically tied to assignments in the workbook.

WORKBOOK
ASSIGNMENTS

A difficult part
for many students is to look at the course as a regular course, just
delivered in a different mode. Some get it while others adopt an out-of-sight,
out-of-mind attitude. They think that a class that they don't have to
attend is a class they don't have to work in. They don't survive.

Assignments are
posted by e-mail to students twice a week: Sunday night/Monday morning
and Wednesday night/Thursday morning. They are due Wednesday night and
Saturday night. Students can submit them any time during the three-day
period. Some turn them in within hours of posting and others wait until
the last minute.

It is important
to give students feedback on assignments right away, even if it is to
say that you received the assignment. I copy the written assignment
and past it into a "Reply" window. (I don't like the quote indicators
my e-mail program puts with replies, so the copy/paste method is a cleaner
interface.) When I want to comment on portion of an assignment I put
a number in parenthesis. Then above the original assignment I type out
a full comment, sort of a footnote in reverse. Some assignments have
no comments, some have 15 or more.

Typing comments
can be time consuming. All the students in the class are working on
the same assignments at the same time and you can get tired of writing
the same comment on nearly every assignment. Years ago I discovered
a shareware program for the Macintosh that makes it easy to deal with
repetitive typing. Called TypeIt4Me, the program allows you to store
comments and assign a key word title to it. Type the title and a pre-defined
hotkey and the computer will type in the recorded comment for you. For
instance, when I want to explain the AP style noon or midnight on times
to someone, I simply type "noon" and the hotkey ">" and this shows up:

Use noon or midnight,
not 12 a.m. or 12 p.m. Noon and midnight are easier terms to understand
and always happen exactly at 12. If it were 12:01, you would need the
a.m. or p.m.

If an assignment
is acceptable, I notify the student that the assignment is "OKAY" (or
PHAT) and record it (see my other article on grade sheets). If it needs
to be redone I fire it back to the student for a redo. And I issue a
lot of "redos." I take care to make sure that comments are learning
devices, not merely the correct answer. Take for instance the example
given above. It would be easy to just write "noon" instead of the whole
comment, but would the student learn from just being given the right
word?

WHO IS TAKING
THE CLASS?

One of the concerns
I think every teacher has who teaches a distance education class is
whether or not it is really the student who is doing the work in the
class. Couldn't the student have someone else doing the work? Yes, I
guess it could happen. But then again, a student could hire a ringer
to attend my day class every day. I don't give tests in this class,
I just give a lot of assignments. I guess a student could get someone
else to do the work, but I give so many assignments -- between 70 and
75 a semester per student-- that it would impractical for someone to
have another person do the work.

Online courses
are not for everyone --students or teachers. They take a lot of discipline,
organization and time. But if you can figure out how to do it and maintain
high standards for your classes, it can be fun and rewarding. And you
get a chance to reach out to students like Maria Gonzalez, who might
not otherwise ever get a chance to take a journalism course.